THE LIFE OF MAMMALS 
can fight off a lion or leopard as well as the buffalo, doing it, 
however, more after the manner of a swordsman. Schulz, 
whose book * is a storehouse of facts for the student of African 
zodlogy, notes that a lion does not dare attack such antelopes 
as the sable or roan in the usual manner, i.e. from behind, 
for with their backward-sweeping, scimiterlike horns they would 
transfix him the instant he alighted on their haunches. But 
even seizing by the nose becomes perilous in the case of so well 
armed a species as the gemsbok, or any oryx, which, Schulz 
asserts, with its straight horns capable of acting both behind 
and before, coupled to its heroic spirit, is the most formidable 
animal the lion can attack. 
How do the human tenants of his realm get on with this 
terrible neighbor? The beast everywhere disappears before 
Lion determined and well-armed opposition, but other- 
and Man. wise humanity simply becomes a part of its food 
resources. When in the flourishing period of Rome the colonists 
in North Africa were forbidden to kill lions because hundreds 
must be captured alive annually for the Imperial circus games, 
they became at last such an unendurable scourge to agriculture 
and travel that the Emperor Honorius was obliged to choose 
between his playthings and the lives of his taxpayers, and allow 
the former to be killed off. Were the African negroes the pusil- 
lanimous creatures that many East Indians are, their continent 
would be practically uninhabitable, but most Africans are brave 
folk, and are little hindered by a craven beast worship, such as 
shields the tiger in many parts of India. The nearest approach 
to that is hinted at in a remarkable yarn told to Cameron 
by one of his men in Kasongaland, southwest of Lake Tan- 
ganyika. 
“Tn the village next to that in which he [Cameron’s informant] lived 
the people were on most friendly terms with the lions, which used to walk 
in and about the village, without attempting to injure any one. On great 
occasions they were treated to honey, goats, sheep, and ugali, and some- 
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